Donald Trump will nominate Gen. John Kelly, the third retired Marine general Trump has picked for a high-level position, to head the Department of Homeland Security. Trump will also nominate Oklahoma attorney general and Environmental Protetection Agency critic Scott Pruitt to the EPA. Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, meanwhile, a friend of China President Xi Jinping, will be nominated as U.S. ambassador to China.

A judge in Philadelphia rejected a request by Jill Stein to inspect some of the city's voting machines.

Two juveniles have been arrested in relation to the wildfires in Tennessee that killed 14 people.

The Syrian army retook the old city in Aleppo, with rebels trying to plan an exit.

A flight in Pakistan carrying 48 people crashed, leaving no survivors.

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Actually, you kind of do want a suck-up in the ambassadorship job: ambassadors don’t make policy, they just deliver the news. I’d rather bad news delivered by a suck-up who will say everything possible to soften the blow and soothe bruised egos, while the clear-eyed straight shooters need to be the ones actually making the policy.

It’s actually fuckin brilliant. Trump just got a title ‘leverage’ on the ChiComs by talking to Taiwan Prez. That’s their soft spot – they are sensitive about being illegitimate. Branstad is good cop to Trumps bad cop. It’s genius.

Trump’s pick for EPA head is outSTANDING. I am drinking NPR tears right now, so salty but so so sweet. Like honey roasted peanuts. If he keeps up with more quality cabinet picks I could see myself caring less about his shitty AG choice.

I haven’t read anything that’s filled me with confidence that she’ll be an effective advocate for charter schools or school reform generally. It’s nice that she’s an advocate for them at all, but if things get shitty over the next four years it’ll be charter schools that are blamed not her incompetence at implementing them so I’m wary.

I don’t know how accurate the picture they’re painting of her as a loon is although she comes by social conservatism honestly.

Actually, in 48 states latitudes, we’re at about the earliest sunsets. Due to the orbit around the sun, “local noons” (when a sundial would show noon) aren’t exactly 24:00:00 apart from one day to the next, and the amount of time from one local noon to the next is more than the amount of daylight we’re still losing. The latest sunrises will also be several days after the solstice.

The nearly identical lengths of equatorial days exacerbate this effect, so in Quito, Ecuador, the earliest sunsets are in late October, while the latest are in February.

One of the saddest things during the election was right after Johnson’s Aleppo ‘answer.’ Limbaugh had the perfect libertarian answer to the question: something to the effect of – that is a foreign entanglement. the US should not be involved there. Maybe not Limbaugh’s position, but he knew the correct libertarian position.

On the forced cake decorating issue, on Glenn Beck’s show for crying out loud, EVERYBODY knew the libertarian answer, except Gary Johnson.

It was sarcasm. A guy with a BA in English and a MFA in Creative Writing has had the president’s ear for the past eight years and we have been involved in more foreign countries. I don’t know if all the generals will be that much better, but I don’t know how they could be that much worse.

A guy with a BA in English and a MFA in Creative Writing has had the president’s ear for the past eight years

To be fair = Ben Rhodes job is not to recommend any foreign policy decisions, but rather to *explain* other people’s decisions to the press.

He cooks up “narratives” that make the president look smart no matter what’s happening. If there’s any “most useful application of an MFA in creative writing, ever”, its either that, or someone who made millions in advertising.

He claims to spend a few hours every day talking with Obama, so he has to be doing more than just crafting the public message. Substitute Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Condoleezza Rice, Ash Carter, Leon Panetta, Robert Gates, or Donald Rumsfeld for Ben Rhodes and my point stands.

“It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear. Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”http://www.nytimes.com/interac…..ic-fallout

Melania Trump was slut-shamed and called a trophy wife,’ said Kelly, who then turned her attention to the President-elect.

‘I have high hopes for him. Despite the tweets and all the rest of it, there is much to admire about Donald Trump,’ said Kelly, which immediately elicited booing from a few people, the loudest being comedian Kathy Griffin.

‘There is. Stop that, stop that. There’s room for the loyal opposition in this country,’ said Kelly at that point, a comment which resulted in Griffin screaming, ‘F*** him.’

“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.”

Emergent Gravity has a lot of nice qualities, in that it is the only “fundamental” force outside of the GUT. And this, if confirmed, would also solve the GR/QT problems. Unfortunately, it does not appear to allow for time travel, yet.

Sorry, I meant to say that we can relate nuclear strong, nuclear weak, and electromagnetics through quantum theory. Gravity is the fourth “fundamental” force that would need to be integrated for a Theory of Everything. If gravity is not fundamental, but rather an emergent property, then there are only 3 fundamental forces already tied together by QED.

Perhaps. Fully vetting and gaining acceptance for a model like this could take a decade. Keep in mind that the current model which accepts dark matter is based on the complete lack of evidence of dark matter, but merely an attempt to fill in the blanks when the rules don’t seem to work the way they should.

Keep in mind that the current model which accepts dark matter is based on the complete lack of evidence of dark matter,

Let’s say direct evidence. If the modified inverse square law applies everywhere like GR says, there must be matter we can’t directly observe out there. So the very fact that galaxies should fly apart, but all other predictions are verified AND there is correlating cosmological evidence from the CMBR that (if GR is the final word) also indicate a reason to believe there might be some non-interacting matter, act as evidence. But it is all based on “if this is true”, which has not been directly verified.

A fair correction. I’m not really a physicist, just a dilettante, so I don’t always speak as precisely as I’d like.

I’m still amused that gravity is one of the most easily observable forces for humans, and yet it remains really difficult to pin down. I’m sure 90% of the world doesn’t understand how gravity ties into GR, and it’s absolutely a huge step forward when you look at the mechanical theories of gravitation that existed before then (Cartesian physics had some weird-ass models). But there are always more questions left to be answered.

Went down rabbit hole with some Slate puppets while back over this, about dark matter being inferred from gravitational anomalies alone, and how enmeshed the whole idea is with GR validity. I compared dark matter to the old 19th century aether.

Particularly virulent puppet said galactic rotation curves were a Newtonian effect with no relation to GR. I told him GR covers gravity-anything. He replied that a classic Newtonian experiment like a cannonball’s flight was stupid as test of GR(?). I replied it was perfectly valid, and at high enough precision would yield a more accurate prediction than Newtonian mechanics. I was then informed I had obviously never taken a ‘GR class in college.’

The interaction was teachable moment of the lib-love for charts and science-y stuff combined with lack of thinking and appeals to authority for validation.

Yes, the lensing is interesting effect – and just like anything else dark matter a gravitational anomaly vs. what lensing value ‘should be’ from the visible matter.

The Slate puppet I referenced understood lensing as a ‘GR effect’ but perceived something like just orbital motion (rotation curve) as being exclusively ‘Newtonian,’ like there’s some distinction that matches the chapter flow in any general-interest book on physics.

SunPower, the No. 2 U.S. solar panel maker, said on Wednesday it would lay off about 25% of its workforce, or 2,500 employees, and close one plant as part of a cost-cutting plan announced last month to counter slumping prices.

Solar companies have been hard hit after stiff competition pushed prices of solar panels lower and as customers held off purchases in the hope of a further decline in prices.

Obama’s solar panel and biofuel cronies know that the subsidy gravy train is off the tracks. More deliciousness. I don’t know how much more I can stand. I am starting to feel like I do after thanksgiving dinner.

Starbucks, looking to the future as its longtime CEO moves to other projects, plans to open 12,000 new locations within five years to boost its number of coffee shops worldwide by almost 50 percent.

About 5,000 of the 12,000 stores Starbucks plans to open by 2021 will be in China. The company said again that it expects China to eventually overtake the U.S. as its largest market, but didn’t say when it expects that to happen. Today there are about 2,500 stores in China and more than 13,000 in the U.S.

Starbucks also wants to get more customers to buy lunch at its shops by offering organic soups and adding more sandwiches and wraps. An app update next year will use artificial intelligence technology to let customers order by voice and have the app respond immediately with a message.

I went to school with a girl who lived near me. They took horses and ponies and pigs and every other animal you can imagine out of the house she lived in with her family. She did not last long on this planet.

Her adoptive father was murdered by her adoptive mother’s internet boyfriend. Her adopted brother set the family’s house and many barns on fire after the murder. She was in and out of jail. Then her boyfriend attacked and killed her with a machette.

Her adoptive father was murdered by her adoptive mother’s internet boyfriend. Her adopted brother set the family’s house and many barns on fire after the murder. She was in and out of jail. Then her boyfriend attacked and killed her with a machette.

The State Department said the embassy provided some customers “fraudulently obtained, legitimate US visas” as well as counterfeit visas, false identification documents (including bank records, education records, birth certificates, and others). It says the operation paid corrupt officials to obtain legitimate blank documents to be doctored.

And a hilarious admission of incompetence from the journo class:

Why are we talking about this now? According to the time stamp, the State Department published the news of the arrests on 2 November. The BBC’s Thomas Naadi in Ghana’s capital, Accra, says the arrests took place a few months earlier than this, in June. It is a bit of a mystery why it was not picked up by media until 2 December. But when it was, it was widely shared on social media.

I bet State didn’t even tweet out the news release. There we have the true tragedy of this story – how can media operate in the environment where information is not on Twitter? And just a reminder: Hiter never used Twitter, either.

I was ‘friends’* with some real jerks in HS who beat the shit out of everyone. The ‘enforcement’ Dean (every school has – or rather, *had* – one in my day) regularly got into situations where he’d tackle these guys and put them in headlocks. I talked to him about it once, and he loved his job. He even gave some of these same jerk-kids a hug when they graduated.

(*”friends'” = ‘not enemies’. we grew up together. it was either you were on their side, or you were their victims)

I’ve been working on selling my house FSBO for the last month or so. We’re under contract, but this is the second offer we accepted. We had this offer when we accepted the other, and we chose the other primarily because this Realtor seemed like a prick. A month later, I’ve confirmed that he is a prick, a liar, and extremely argumentative. Every little provision has to be negotiated, and he’s in full force advocacy mode for each one. I’ve caught him flat out lying to me more than once, but we’re at a point where we can’t afford to go back on the market and find another offer before we do our cross-country move.

Anyway, after he lied to me once again today, I just stopped giving a shit, and wrote him an email that effectively said “either you accept our offered concession for the inspection repairs or GTFO.” Thankfully, my post-graduation job has a location here in town, so we have a backup plan if things don’t go through. Anyway, I just needed to vent because this guy has been an asshole from day one, and it makes planning a cross-country move really fucking hard when you don’t know whether he’s gonna torpedo the deal for his clients.

Don’t have much use for those guys. The first realtor I had to sell my house wanted me to drop $25000 into my house so I could sell it for $125k, maybe 130k. I put maybe $6500 in it and sold it for $117k. He wanted me to drop a bunch of cash so he could have an easy sale and make an extra grand. Now, the guy who sold me that house, Andy second realtor who sold the house, they were good guys who worked on my behalf.